The typical footprint of a high-brightness white LED is around 1×1 mm2 (such as those used in automotive forward lighting or camera flash applications); however, white LED sources with a small footprint, high surface brightness, and high efficiency are desirable for certain applications such as when they are employed as light sources for displays. For example, high brightness enables efficient coupling to display waveguides and smaller optics or no optics. Likewise, a small footprint helps reduce the size of the optics and the thickness of a display system. It is also desirable that the LED's surface be flat rather than dome-shaped, to improve system optical efficiency.
Contemporary literature has discussed how small sources below 300 μm2 can be desirable for display applications; however, only monochromatic sources are proposed. White sources require a color-conversion element for white-light generation, which makes their miniaturization challenging.
Therefore, what is needed is an LED source that has a small surface area, and emits a sufficient optical power from substantially one surface with a sufficient efficiency.
This may be achieved in at least two ways:                1. Using a low-droop device architecture which can be driven to a very high current density while maintaining sufficient efficiency; and        2. Designing the electrode scheme such that a large enough fraction of the footprint is used for light generation.        
Embodiments of the disclosure may use either of these approaches, or combine them. Below are described embodiments following these approaches.